No more clock-based passivity from the novelist, who interrupted a 20 -year routine with a decision to embrace the unpredictable
I used to be a penalty morning writer, but in the spring of 2010 I was visiting a router-making facility in Shanghais Pudong district and witnessed thousands of workers in robins egg off-color jumpsuits constructing the gear are required to pole-vault Chinas technological connectedness ahead of all other countries in our new international order. This tableau stimulated in me a soothing realisation that “the worlds” was changing even more quickly than Id thought it was, and that Id better shake concepts up creatively to keep pace with it.
I asked myself a few questions: how can I imbue myth with that same fractal sense of falling down a rabbit hole that we all ordeal when were online? How can writing compete with Netflix? How could I compress spirit into as few paroles as possible not just on a page but something people can read from a gondola at 50 miles per hour?
To this end I intentionally upended what had been a 20 -year-old writing number. No more AM clock-based passivity, calmly awaiting words that may or may not come is dependent on the fussiness of my muse. No more predictability; instead of sitting there find nostalgic for my pre-internet intelligence, I tried to figure out what my brand-new intelligence was becoming and how that affected my writing. So if “youre asking me” what is my usual author daylight, I have no specific react, only a series of tendencies which together characterize my brand-new writing normal.
One: I do much of my writing on airplanes. Im actually at my happiest when Im writing on a plane, and Im writing these paroles on an aircraft right now, Lufthansa flight 1436 from Frankfurt to St Petersburg. Theres no Wi-Fi( sanctuary !) and Im having that not distressing wizard of soon-to-end Schengen-era statelessness the kind of transnational fluidity so accurately touted by Monocle magazine a headspace where all the men wear slim-fit clothe and all the women in little black attires go back to the power from the Embassy function to do some late nighttime C ++ coding.
Q: Would you like a glass of water with your vodka tonic ?
A: No. Thats why God fabricated ice cubes .
Two: I do much of my writing in hotel rooms, specially if theres a deadline. Actually, since I wrote the above paragraph Ive property and am now in the Saint petersburg W inn which has killer Wi-Fi and interior design picks possibly did( in the best possible gumption) by an oligarchs mistress. Theres something about being in a inn area most scribes know this implicitly that free-spokens up ones seeing. First you target a scorched globe do-not-disturb on your email account( autoreply: Im dead and hence unable to reply to your email) and second, hide the mobile phone in the desk drawer and its almost as good as being on a plane. None can reach you. Youre safe.
Three: I write in places connected in definable ways to the forces of both globalisation and deglobalisation: Shanghai router-making facilities; Chilean classrooms taken over by demonstrating students, the chambers now converted into artists studios; the International House of Pancakes on the north back of Interstate 15 in Las Vegas. The more random and unpredictable the better.
Theres a kind of existential heebie-jeebies that accompanies the defection of number: what if I lose my the competences and they never come back? What if I become too fragmented? What if the forces of the future Im trying to depict crush me like a flaw? But then , good-for-nothing ventured , good-for-nothing gained. The nature has never been so interesting as it is now. How sad not got to go and bungee-jump into it from a cosmic New Zealand cliff.
A few years back, the New York Times did a series of photographs of scribes in their copy plazas. All of the other ones I considered were of desks in almost empty white areas with linen sheers blowing in through the windows. The photo of me was of a small room covered black with all of the walls covered in shelving that was densely filled with hoarder-like quantities of designing objects and skill. I dont understand why columnists would want an empty grey area. Its like a analogy for no life after life after death. My spaces will never be normal; ordinary has never seemed to be your best friend. Words ever come first.
Bit Rot, a collecting of legends and essays by Douglas Coupland, issued by Heinemann on 13 October. To guild a imitate for 16.40( RRP 20) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p& p over 10, online guilds simply. Telephone guilds min p& p of 1.99.
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